Mentorship is never just about guidance. It’s about navigating the tension between care and conflict, between silence and presence, between being seen and being misunderstood. For Tanveer Anoy and Mehra Shirazi, the journey of Anoy’s MA thesis "Still Existing, Still Surviving: Origin Stories and the Shaping of Queer Activist Grassroots Archives in Bangladesh" was not simply academic pursuit, it was an emotional, political and intimate journey, often fraught with challenges.

This event is a conversation between a mentee and a mentor who found themselves entangled in the complex labor of telling queer stories from a place of survival. Moderated by Shaina Khan, a Ph.D. candidate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, the dialogue will explore the often-invisible dynamics of mentorship: the unsaid expectations, the moments of fracture, and the work of repair. Through sharing personal stories and tensions, Anoy and Mehra will reflect on what it means to build a partnership in a system that rarely makes space for slowness, mutuality, or discomfort.

The thesis at the heart of this mentorship revolved around a deeply autoethnographic project, one that carried the complexities of queer trauma, survivor memory, political exile, and archival resistance. Writing it meant confronting grief, navigating institutional gatekeeping, and choosing vulnerability within a structure that often demands detachment. It also meant placing trust in someone, transcending generational, cultural, and epistemic boundaries, to hold that process with care.

This is not simply a success story: It’s a living story. One where care had to be redefined again and again. One where both mentor and mentee learned the importance of honest communication to speak honestly, even when it felt uncomfortable. Ultimately, the outcome was not just the thesis itself, but a relationship built on shared understanding and liberatory care.

Too often, mentorship in academia is imagined as a one-way path. But in queer, feminist, and decolonial work, mentorship is a site of negotiation and sometimes rupture, a space where mutual accountability and creative collaboration can happen, but only when both parties choose to show up fully.

This event invites all of us, students, faculty, activists, and educators, to rethink what we owe each other in spaces of learning and care, because mentorship is not a gift or a transaction, it is a commitment to listen, to grow, and to stay, even when it’s messy.